{"id":103129,"date":"2023-03-25T17:05:30","date_gmt":"2023-03-25T15:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=103129"},"modified":"2023-03-25T09:01:30","modified_gmt":"2023-03-25T07:01:30","slug":"31-05-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=103129","title":{"rendered":"Were \u2018Ordinary Poles\u2019 Perpetrators of the Holocaust?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Were \u2018Ordinary Poles\u2019 Perpetrators of the Holocaust?<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nTOMASZ FRYDEL<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Rescuing peasants under Nazi occupation from the condescension of history.<\/strong><\/span>
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A German soldier interrogates Polish peasants in a bomb crater, 1939TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY\/GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The framework of categories introduced by Raul Hilberg\u2014perpetrators, victims, and bystanders\u2014once conventionally employed in understanding the destruction of European Jewry has started to fall out of fashion among historians of the Holocaust. In the case of East Central Europe, particularly Poland, the people situated at the edges of the volcanic eruption of genocide have invariably begun their slide from \u201cbystanders\u201d to \u201cperpetrators\u201d in the recent turn in scholarship since the publication of Jan T. Gross\u2019\u00a0Neighbors<\/em>. Apart from the national debate unleashed in Poland in 2001, the major contribution of the book to the historiography was to banish a view of ethnic Poles solely as victims of Nazi Germany and to substantiate a long-standing claim found in Jewish survivor testimonies that Poles sometimes acted as perpetrators of Judeocide. The Jedwabne pogrom of July 11, 1941, has become the cornerstone of discussions about collaboration and perpetrators at the grassroots level in East Central Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The seeds of a second, though much slower, paradigm shift can be found in the work of Polish historians focused on what they call the \u201cthird phase\u201d of the Holocaust, namely the attempt by the Germans to destroy the remaining Jews who survived Operation Reinhard\u2014the code name given to the secret Nazi plan to murder all Polish Jews in the gas chambers of Be\u0142\u017cec, Sobib\u00f3r, and Treblinka. These fugitives from Nazi German law fled ghettos and jumped off trains headed for death camps as they sought shelter among peasants in rural areas. The working assumption among these historians is that approximately 250,000 Jews\u2014roughly 10 per cent of the 2.5 million Jews still alive in the summer of 1942\u2014made the escape to the so-called Aryan side. Of these, it is estimated that fewer than 50,000 survived.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Unlike in the previous stages of ghettoization and deportation to death camps, where Polish society could do little to divert the Nazi steamroller of genocide, here, in the space of the \u201chunt for Jews\u201d (Judenjagd<\/em>), allegedly out of reach of German authority, ethnic Poles had a larger say in the fate of the 200,000 fugitive Jews who did not survive. The issue of Polish behavior on this measurable \u201cperiphery of the Holocaust\u201d thus represents the load-bearing question of Polish responsibility. Arguing against an older framework born under Poland\u2019s Communist regime (1944\u201389) that regards Polish participation in anti-Jewish acts as carried out by the criminal dregs found on the \u201cmargins\u201d of every society, these historians are careful to emphasize that the perpetrators often represented \u201cordinary\u201d Poles, not uncommonly well-respected members of local communities. The recent wave of scholarship\u2014which makes reference to the murder of Tutsi in Rwanda and Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica\u2014is poised to interpret these events as part of a tradition of ethnic cleansing on the historiographical map. The vision of violence here is a kind of mobile Jedwabne in the Polish \u201ckilling fields.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I argue here that something like the opposite of grassroots ethnic cleansing can be demonstrated. Peasant society participated in the capture and killing of Jews, but mostly within locally situated dynamics of communal fear and survival\u2014not necessarily ethnic hatred or extreme nationalism\u2014and this after the structures of village authority were reconfigured for the purpose by the occupation authorities. I offer a reappraisal of this phase of genocide using a different methodology to interrogate the meaning of \u201cperpetrators\u201d and \u201ccollaboration\u201d within this framework. First, I contextualize the shelter and the manhunts for fugitive Jews with parallel processes aimed at other fugitive groups, such as Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), Roma, deserters from the German army, and others. Second, I situate the actions of the perpetrators within a broad system of surveillance operations that conditioned local societies in obedience to German law. Third, I suggest the German occupation gave rise to two different trajectories of experience between Poles and Jews, which frequently culminated in an existential competition. This competition, in turn, helps us to understand the specific dynamics of grassroots violence. Fourth, I focus on the unique case of perpetrators who participated in both harming Jews and helping them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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My approach is informed by a simple observation. While the Second Polish Republic witnessed official support for discriminatory anti-Jewish measures and growing outbursts of anti-Jewish violence, particularly in the period of accelerated democratic erosion following the death of Marshall J\u00f3zef Pi\u0142sudski from 1936\u201339, the vast majority of Poles\u2014as the majority of Germans at this time\u2014had no experience with murder as a category of thought or action. Yet within a few years of the Second World War, in specific moments of the occupation, the denunciation and murder of Jews would be met with a significant level of social approval. It is in the \u201chunt for Jews\u201d that the German occupation authorities co-opted segments of Polish society into active participation in genocide.<\/span><\/p>\n

The approach taken here aims to disaggregate the notion of the Holocaust into smaller genocidal episodes or phases. Unlike other genocides, the Holocaust was unprecedented in that it compressed various forms of destruction within a short time period: mass executions, pogroms, ghettoization, death camps, manhunts for Jews, and so-called death marches. Each of these stages introduced its own structure and dynamics of violence. The \u201cFinal Solution of the Jewish Question\u201d was a continent-wide undertaking applied in widely varying contexts. In the territories of the former Second Polish Republic under German occupation, now within the larger\u00a0Lebensraum<\/em>, it was superimposed on distinct policies targeted at other groups within the indigenous population. These policies rearranged the relations of its various victim groups. The focus here is on the\u00a0Judenjagd<\/em>\u00a0from 1942\u201344, but the source base is significantly widened to observe peasant behavior within the broader dilemmas faced by rural societies. This is not to suggest that the\u00a0Judenjagd<\/em>\u00a0was a mere byproduct of the occupation, but that it was part of a wider social space and cannot be understood solely by recourse to cases that involved Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The geographical focus is a region that corresponded to the eastern part of District Krakow of the General Government under German occupation, or historic Western Galicia.<\/span><\/p>\n

A crucial change undergone by rural society during the war resulted from the restructuring of village authority and accountability. A new set of responsibilities was imposed on village society that profoundly altered its choice architecture and social relations. The occupation authorities were primarily interested in the Polish province as a source of food quotas to feed the German army and \u201chuman quotas,\u201d or forced laborers, for the Third Reich. The village head (so\u0142tys<\/em>) bore the brunt of the responsibility for meeting these quotas.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In order to help the village head carry out his duties, the Germans instituted a system of village guards (Ortschutzwache<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Ortschutz<\/em>), whose members were often drawn from the local fire brigades. The\u00a0Ortschutz<\/em>\u00a0was de facto a kind of local militia headed by a commander. A secondary system of \u201chostages\u201d (zak\u0142adnicy<\/em>) made these men personally responsible for maintaining \u201csecurity\u201d over their areas of jurisdiction. If the village guards were not sufficient, a village head could always turn to the Polish \u201cBlue\u201d Police (Polnische Polizei<\/em>\/PP). The Blue Police\u2014named informally after the color of their uniforms\u2014was itself drawn from the prewar state Police, which was subordinated to the German Order Police (Ordnungspolizei<\/em>; in rural areas, the gendarmerie).<\/span><\/p>\n

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After the invasion of the Soviet Union and the commencement of Operation Reinhard, the screws of this system were tightened and its scope broadened. It was the responsibility of each village head not only to apprehend Polish laborers, but to report and deliver any Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, partisans (\u201cbandits\u201d), strangers, or outsiders to the nearest gendarmerie or PP station. Thus, the same system that was already turned against ethnic Polish society in the forceful extraction of various quotas was expanded into a system of surveillance against all categories of people targeted by Nazi Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On 10 November 1941, Hans Frank, Governor of the General Government, instituted the death penalty for people who offered any help to Jews outside of ghettos, a measure that could be\u2014and often was\u2014exercised in the form of collective punishment. But in the context of the village system, this punishment was extended to \u201cfailure\u201d to report and apprehend fugitives. In essence, villages were now weaponized against outsiders and the whole system was held in place by draconian threats at each level of authority. It is no accident that the overwhelming majority of individuals tried for collaboration after the war\u2014the village heads, members of the village guard, messengers, foresters, and gamekeepers, who figure in these cases\u2014were indeed \u201cordinary\u201d Poles. But in most cases, they did not represent a random sample of peasants, but those tried for collaboration precisely on the basis of their position in the \u201csecurity\u201d gridlock that they found themselves in, not a shared ideological profile. It was the institutional role that largely determined the range of behavior.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Thus, at its root, the village surveillance system was aimed at a variety of fugitives, and Soviet POWs represented the largest parallel group next to Jews. Although history has provided researchers with a control group, it is a wonder that no historian has taken advantage of this fact in the enormous scholarship on the rescue of Jews in Poland.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What is striking here is that the manhunts for Jews bear a remarkable similarity to the manhunts for Soviet POWs. To take a few examples: in 1943, the village of Brzez\u00f3wka (Rzesz\u00f3w county) witnessed two cases of captured prisoners of war. In the first case, Rozalia \u017burek took in a young man who was asking for food and shelter. She later learned that he was an escaped Soviet POW and let him stay, as he helped her with the fall harvest and entertained her children by writing in Cyrillic. However, word got out and members of the village guard appeared at her home to take the POW away. He turned to the guard commandant \u201cwith a plea to spare his life, as he\u2019s a young man, he wants to live and return to his parents, he\u2019s a prisoner of war, who explained clearly to the accused that he\u2019s from Leningrad, that he took part in fighting the Germans and was wounded.\u201d He then tried to escape, but one of the guards struck him down with an axe. The prisoner was taken to a Polish Police station, where he was likely shot.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the second case, Franciszek Sowa, the village head, notified the Polish Police in B\u0142a\u017cowa that Aniela Mita\u0142 was sheltering a Soviet POW of Russian background who had jumped off a transport. The denunciation was passed up the chain of command, and the following day the German gendarmerie and Polish Police were dispatched to Mita\u0142\u2019s home. When they failed to find the escaped prisoner, they shot Aniela Mita\u0142, her nine-year-old daughter, and 10-year-old son. Her home was set on fire and the village guard was ordered to throw their bodies into the burning building. Likewise, in the village of Przysz\u00f3w (Stalowa Wola county), Marcin Kotwica, the gamekeeper (gajowy<\/em>) was accused of apprehending and handing over to the German police three escaped French POWs, one of whom attempted to trade his coat in exchange for a piece of bread. In yet another case, Jan Kostak, the village head of Turza (Kolbuszowa county), along with hostage Ludwik Matu\u0142a and village messenger (goniec<\/em>) Tomasz Mika, apprehended three young Soviet POWs, who were looking for shelter for the night. They delivered the young men to the German police, where they were shot.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still, manhunts went beyond Jews and Soviet POWs\u2014peasants were also drawn into manhunts for fellow villagers evading forced labor in Germany. For example, in the village of Przykop (Mielec county) in July 1942, J\u00f3zef Rac\u0142awski, the commandant of the Ortschutz, received an order to apprehend Poles to be sent to Germany. One of the people he was forced to capture was his own sister.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a number of cases, the village guard and local peasants were mobilized in manhunts for partisans or \u201cbandits,\u201d in the nomenclature of the occupation authorities. In the village of Las (\u017bywiec county), Emil Micha\u0142ek was ordered by the commandant of a German police station to report for such a manhunt. When Micha\u0142ek failed to make it to the police station on time, as he had no shoes, the commandant threatened him, saying he should have \u201cwrapped his feet in rags and reported for the hunt.\u201d Sometimes the very presence of a stranger was cause for alarm. When an unknown woman with a child appeared in the village of Wola Wielka (D\u0119bica county) in January of 1943, the entire community was thrown into an existential dilemma as villagers debated how best to proceed. Some claimed she was a Jew, others that she was a Roma, she herself claimed that she was a wandering beggar. In the end, the locals decided not to take a risk and applied pressure on the village head to deliver mother and child to the police.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Manhunts for Jews were entangled with manhunts for other fugitives. People who sheltered Jews sometimes sheltered prisoners of war. A manhunt for Polish laborers could bring into its orbit a manhunt for Jews and vice versa. Village heads were forced to act against Jews as well as members of the ethnic Polish collective, though certainly not in the same genocidal capacity. Perpetrators on the local level could thus be viewed along several axes. Taken on their own and harnessed to a narrative, such incidents could be seen as the smoking gun of unique peasant hatred against a particular victim group; when combined, they force the historian to reconsider the motivation within the broader framework that informed such actions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obedience to this system was reinforced by informers working for the German police. For our purpose, informers are significant for two reasons. First, knowledge of their presence and operations conditioned the behavior of locals to propel peasants along a path leading to inaction or perpetration. A particularly sinister role was played by agent provocateurs under various covers. These informers, or\u00a0V-Personen<\/em>, compiled lists of those who gave them shelter, inquired about who possessed weapons or maintained contact with partisans.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The use of informers posing as escaped Soviet POWs appears to have been the most widespread practice. The village of Styk\u00f3w (Rzesz\u00f3w county) was \u201ctested\u201d three times by such informers. In the village of \u017burowa and Rac\u0142awice (Tarn\u00f3w county), \u201can incident took place where members of the Gestapo dressed up as Russians … [and] caused the burning down of two homes and the shooting of two families.\u201d The two men dressed in Soviet uniforms returned the following day in the uniforms of the SS and in the company of other policemen to execute those who had opened their doors to them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The plot thickens when the Polish province emerges as a zone teeming with every variety of informer, Gestapo agent, and false-flag operation, fueling an atmosphere of distrust. In the town of \u0141a\u0144cut and vicinity, Maria Steinberg was seen by locals walking around \u201cdressed as a chimney sweep,\u201d only to be later seen (along with another informer) in the company of the German gendarmerie, assisting in the \u201cpacification\u201d of the village of \u017bo\u0142ynia, where 14 people were killed. Monthly underground reports carefully observed intricate false-flag operations. Still, locals unwittingly often stepped into these traps.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the spring of 1943, the Criminal Police (Kripo<\/em>) and gendarmerie of D\u0119bica had set up base in the village of \u0141\u0105czki Kucharskie (Ropczyce county), dressed up as armed partisans, and walked through neighboring villages. They passed through the village of Glinik on April 10, 1943 and returned there the following day now as German policemen to execute locals for failing to inform them about the presence of partisans in the region. They executed a few villagers, stopping only when some locals identified the German policemen as the very same group of \u201cpartisans\u201d that had passed through the village the previous day.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Second, some categories of informers, recruited as they were from among victim groups, tell us something important about the dramatic transformation of victims into perpetrators that took place during the war. Within the above set of practices, the use of informers posing as fugitive Jews was hardly off limits. Various partisan formations of the underground movement were acutely aware of this. For example, a unit of the Peasant Battalions in the Krosno region \u201csold a machine gun for 3,000 z\u0142 to a member of the Jas\u0142o Gestapo, Becker [Oskar B\u00e4cker], posing as a Jew,\u201d and once contact was established, the entire unit was eventually penetrated and destroyed by the German police. Similarly, a Home Army report from the fall of 1942 warned: \u201cOver 15 spies have been dispatched into each county, who are to roam the region as peddlers, Jews, nuns, and soldiers escaping from camps.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But perhaps the most counterintuitive is the participation of Jews themselves with the Gestapo in the surveillance of the local population and the\u00a0Judenjagd<\/em>. After the war, Christoph F\u00fchrer, who was part of the German civilian administration, reported the following scenario: \u201c[In 1942] I met two Jews on a country road, who had previously lived in D\u0119bica, equipped with identity cards issued by the Gestapo. They had an assignment to ferret out hidden Jews.\u201d The Mielec Gestapo used several Jewish\u00a0V-Leute<\/em>\u00a0in the region. One of these was a 20-year-old woman with the pseudonym of Sophie, who was transferred to the Mielec post in the spring of 1943 and was dispatched into the region to penetrate the underground movement.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A labor camp established by a German firm, B\u00e4umer und L\u00f6sch, in the Czekaj forest near Mielec, included a special barracks for Jewish informers and their families, who were drawn from the Jewish Councils (Judenr\u00e4te<\/em>) of the Mielec and D\u0119bica ghettos and Pustk\u00f3w labor camp, as well as the Jewish ghetto police (Ordnungsdienst<\/em>) of D\u0119bica. Izak Kap\u0142an from Mielec, Herman Immergl\u00fcck from D\u0119bica, and Max Bitkower from Tarn\u00f3w were its three main agents. They were exempt from work in the camp, were permitted to bring their families (Bitkower brought his wife and child from Tarn\u00f3w), and were issued special papers by the Gestapo to allow them to walk around freely. \u201cIn the morning, they left on bicycles and returned at night. We knew that the Gestapo came to visit them\u2014they drank, ate and had fun together. Later it turned out that they rode to the woods where Jews were hiding and denounced them,\u201d stated Jakub Grynblum, who worked in the camp. When they succeeded in persuading fugitive Jews to come to the camp, they were usually taken out and shot by members of the Mielec Gestapo in the nearby forest of Berdech\u00f3w. On April 23, 1943, members of the\u00a0Ortschutz<\/em>\u00a0of nearby Chrz\u0105st\u00f3w allegedly apprehended one of these informers and handed him over to the Polish Police in Mielec. The man was subsequently released and was seen walking around in the company of the German police. These informers operated in the region from the end of 1942 to the summer of 1943, when they were executed by the Gestapo.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Surprising as it may be, the participation of Jewish informers in the\u00a0Judenjagd<\/em>\u00a0was in line with the Nazi policy of\u00a0divide et impera<\/em>\u00a0of its colonial subjects. But the fact alone that victims of genocide could be so dramatically transformed into collaborators and perpetrators ought to take the wind out of sharp claims about the\u00a0Judenjagd<\/em> as an exclusively grassroots, peasant-driven \u201csocial movement\u201d to rid society of its Jews. The effect of these widespread surveillance practices was undoubtedly to condition an automatic response among villagers to immediately report and apprehend any strangers that made their appearance. It seems impossible to understand the irrational fears shared by rural society without taking these factors into account.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The fact alone that victims of genocide could be so dramatically transformed into collaborators and perpetrators ought to take the wind out of sharp claims about the Judenjagd as an exclusively grassroots, peasant-driven \u2018social movement\u2019 to rid society of its Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her study of peasant violence toward Jews, historian and psychologist Barbara Engelking quotes Roza Majerfeld, who experienced the paralyzing taste of death during a German patrol: \u201cMy heart and legs became numb, it\u2019s as if my speech was taken away from me. It was a feeling of death\u2014a faint, sweet taste for a fraction of a second.\u201d Such feelings undoubtedly accompanied many Jews in their desperate search for shelter, which deepened as the\u00a0Judenjagd<\/em>\u00a0swept across the countryside and farmers increasingly refused to open their doors to strangers. Majerfeld herself tasted it many times over, but lived to see liberation. But was the fear experienced by those sheltering Jews any less profound? The German occupation introduced a unique dynamic in which the Poles who undertook the shelter of Jews arguably partook in a shared taste of death. But the taste could evoke different responses.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This tension is captured in the story of Perel Faust and her husband Chaim, who escaped the D\u0119bica ghetto to hide with a Polish family for a period of 22 months in return for payment. When a member of the Gestapo moved into the room next door, the Polish woman asked their Jewish charges to leave, but a granddaughter exclaimed: \u201cGrandmother, if they leave, they will shoot us, for they will certainly reveal that they were with us!\u201d Here began the toxic relationship between the rescuers and the rescued. The Gentile family believed that releasing the Faust couple would lead to their eventual capture\u2014and the betrayal and death of those who gave them help. At the same time, with the German policeman and the Jewish family separated by a thin wall, they could not endure the daily experience of fear. Eventually the Polish couple began making threats that they would have to kill their Jewish charges. \u201cThey did not want to keep us anymore, but they could not let us go, for then they would be in danger. Indeed, they were in great danger,\u201d wrote Faust. During those 22 long months, a series of murder attempts on the Jewish couple using poison, suffocation, and starvation followed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The preceding case is a microcosm of the larger dynamic that emerged between Poles and Jews during the\u00a0Judenjagd<\/em>. On an existential level, one family\u2019s will to survive was pitted against another\u2019s. It was the fundamental Faustian bargain that ordinary people found themselves in during the course of shelter, and it gave rise to a new teleology of murder. In the preceding case, a denunciation by formerly sheltered Jews only appears as a possibility, but a close study of the Subcarpathian region reveals a number of reported incidents. In the same area combed by Kap\u0142an\u2019s group of informers, an older Jewish woman from the village of Grochowe (Mielec county) was captured in the spring of 1943 by the German police. She was marched through the neighboring village of Malinie and beaten into revealing which families had offered her food or shelter. One of the several homes that she indicated was the Witek household. When the German police arrived, they beat the 65-year-old woman living there and, as punishment, ordered her to dig a grave for the Jewish woman underneath her door entrance.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In other cases, it appears that German policemen were able to exploit the vulnerabilities of young people who were captured. For example, Ma\u0142ka Sch\u00f6nfeld, an 18-year-old Jew from the village of Pantalowice (Przeworsk county), was hiding with her family in a forest bunker. On 4 December 1942, she was captured by German gendarmes and denounced the Poles who had provided the family with food. The German policemen took Sch\u00f6nfeld on a horse-drawn cart, as she indicated who in the village had given them help. As a result, the gendarmes executed three young Polish brothers in Pantalowice and six Poles in the village of Hadle Szklarskie. In another case, Nathan Haske was wounded during a manhunt for Jews and turned himself over in the village of W\u00f3lka Ogryzkowa (Przeworsk county). The German policemen \u201cgave him water to drink and promised him that if he tells them everything that they ask, they will send him to a hospital and then to Germany, where he would live.\u201d According to the village head, Haske supplied the policemen with the names of members of the Peasant Battalions in nearby Gniewczyna Tryniecka and Jagie\u0142\u0142a. When the information was exhausted, \u201cGestapoman Zajder told him [Haske] to get up so that he could be taken to a hospital\u201d and shot the young man in the forehead.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Such incidents in the Subcarpathian region could be multiplied. They came to inform Polish anxieties about the dangers of sheltering or even maintaining contact with fugitives and left a strong mark on real-time documents produced during the war. They can be found in the diary of Franciszek Kotula, who kept a chronicle of the \u201cvoice of the street\u201d in the city of Rzesz\u00f3w. The motif of Jews denouncing Poles who gave them shelter appears several times throughout the chronicle. Among others, his entry on December 16, 1942 reads:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Rumors are coming in from all sides that the Germans are murdering entire Polish families if any hidden Jews are found. Whoever is still hiding someone, that person is pushed out and, when captured by the Germans, he most often reveals where he stayed and who gave him food\u2014even though he knows that he will face death anyway.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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His entry on January 11, 1943 captures the case of Ma\u0142ka Sch\u00f6nfeld, among others:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the region around Hy\u017cne, twenty Jews were killed and 10 Poles, who had given them food and shelter. Three sons of the forester in Hadle Szklarskie were killed for sheltering Jews and five peasants in Grzegorz\u00f3wka. The Jews can\u2019t hold out during torture. Even though they know they will die, they betray their hosts.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Every major partisan formation in the region registered this danger. On March 12, 1943, the following order was issued by the Home Army in the Rzesz\u00f3w region:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There has not been a single incident in which a captured Jew did not denounce everyone who offered them help. In many cases, they maliciously give surnames [of individuals] who are completely uninvolved. All are shot on the spot. We have borne many losses because of this. Therefore, I forbid any contact with and help to fleeing Jews.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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A report by the Communist People\u2019s Guard (GL), which was the most sympathetic to Jews, stated the following: \u201cRecently two partisans were killed, who were given away by a Jewish woman hiding among our people.\u201d The Peasant Battalions reported: \u201cCertainly more of them [Jews] could have remained in hiding if it wasn\u2019t for their poor tactics during interrogation when captured by the gendarmerie. In such situations, they reveal everything they know\u2014whom they hid with, who gave them food. The accused face unfortunate consequences, including the loss of life, and so fall victim sooner.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It is important to bear in mind that the accusation was not aimed solely at Jews, but was inherent to the danger of hiding any fugitives. For example, an underground newspaper complained of Soviet POWs denouncing their former shelterers:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Facing imminent danger, the unavoidable bullet, he [the POW] gives away the names of those who had previously given him food and protected him. […] There are only a few exceptions among Russian prisoners of war, who responded to the Germans with silence and contempt during interrogation and the barrage of questions, without betraying those who helped them in difficult times. The rest, although they knew without a doubt that their fate was sealed, extended their life by a few days.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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On one level, Polish-Jewish tensions could be viewed through the prism of ethnicity. Yet the preceding cases suggest that they were also profoundly informed by a competing teleology of survival. The \u201cfaint, sweet taste\u201d of death was undoubtedly experienced by everyone caught in the dynamics of sheltering, even if money was involved. While each case was specific, the fundamental tension was located on a spectrum of existential competition. It is hard to understand the strained conflict between Poles and Jews in this context without appreciating the ever-present fear of death, which, as we have seen, was based on real incidents, but also likely magnified by fear and the power of rumors in a time of war. The struggle for survival had the potential of becoming a zero-sum game, which sometimes left a trail of bodies in its wake.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the institutional level, the occupational authorities had tilted the entire legal, economic, and social landscape toward facilitating genocide, causing a gradual landslide into a moral abyss and social breakdown, especially when Polish government structures above the village level were hijacked and political elites decapitated. At the local level, the lifting of all forms of state protection from Polish society encouraged a kind of tribalization of social relations in rural areas, with lines of mutual distrust and hatred deepening along ethnic lines.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Within the vacuum of legitimate state authority, underground structures aside, it was the Polish Police that often played a role of \u201cstabilizing\u201d the volatile situation, especially in preempting the unpredictability of German terror. These conditions produced a unique type of \u201cperpetrator\u201d\u2014individuals who participated in ways of both harming and helping Jews. Take the case of Karol Stachak, who was both commandant of the PP in Czudec (Strzy\u017c\u00f3w county) and the commander of the local underground Home Army unit (AK Czudec). Among other accusations, he was tried after the war for killing a Jewish man who was brought to the PP station of Lubenia in the spring of 1942 while Stachak was its commandant. During questioning, the man allegedly \u201cgave the names of eight families who sheltered him. The accused and his colleagues were afraid that if they handed him over to Czudec [gendarmerie], the Jew would also denounce these eight families, who would be shot.\u201d Stachak and two other policemen thus shot the man behind the police station.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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However, in the course of the investigation, it was also revealed that Stachak had sheltered a Jewish boy in his home\u2014who survived the war\u2014as everyone in the village was afraid to take him in. Stachak also knew that a Jewish girl was being hidden in a mill by a farmer in Hy\u017cne, yet, according to one witness, \u201che protected her and did not turn her over to the German authorities.\u201d Further, as a member of the Home Army, he procured \u201cAryan papers\u201d for Jews and had a good reputation in the Jewish community.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The occupational authorities had tilted the entire legal, economic, and social landscape toward facilitating genocide, causing a gradual landslide into a moral abyss and social breakdown.<\/span>